1 Cor 13:13 - Three things will last forever - faith, hope, and love
After twelve years of marriage and seven years of trying to have children Dalene and I had given up. We had lost hope.
Hope had died somewhere in between the uninterrupted regularity of Dalene’s monthly cycle, and the whispered “what-ifs” we kept hearing in our heads. What if I’m flawed? What if God doesn’t want this? What if we are being punished? What if it’s our fault?
But just as we had all but abandoned hope, we were met with a promise. It came in the form of an unexpected word over our lives from a pastor friend who asked if he could pray for us. He then declared with assurance that Dalene would be pregnant within a year. That was in February 1999. By the next January, a pregnancy test we had bought with not much expectation had turned positive and set us dancing on top of years of pain.
I am reminded this season of how Herod tried to kill the hope and promise wrapped up in the birth of the Messiah. It took a word from God through an angel to keep the promise alive.
Who is a hope-killer in your life, personally assigned to discourage dreams and give everyone an overdue dose of reality? It could be a teacher, coach or spouse who felt they were doing us a favor by saving us from disappointment if we just set our sights a little lower. It could even be us as we convince ourselves it is safer to not hope than to hope and be disappointed.
In our world there is always someone or something in the spirit of Herod that would attempt to snuff out the hopes of the world just as soon as they are born in our hearts.
But a hope that can’t be killed is a hope conceived in a promise. Jesus was promised to the world in the form of prophecies communicated a couple of hundred times in scripture. The odds of even ten of those predictions from different individuals at different moments in history coming true in one person has been estimated by mathematicians to be 1 in 10 followed by 17 zeros.
Retelling the Christmas story again and again every year reassures us that the hope sown in our hearts by a promise from God is a hope that we can hold on to even when hope killers want to tell us to turn our backs on the impossible.
When I was a young boy, I had hoped to be a famous musician or a professional baseball player. These hopes were killed, not just by a dose of reality when I saw there were so many other more talented shortstops or guitar players than me. The problem was that my hope was not conceived through a direct promise from God.
However, when God spoke to me His plan that I would be a missionary to Bangladesh, hope never died that we would end up going or even staying there - even when faced with the seeming impossibilities of securing visas, raising budgets, or weathering secret police investigations.
Sadly, a hope conceived by a promise can be aborted before it is birthed. The way to carry our hopes to “full-term” then, is to understand where our hope really lies. It’s not in figuring out the what, when and how of the promise’s fulfilment, but rather the Who. The promise of a messiah culminated in the birth of a real person - Jesus. For us, the seed of hope becomes a reality nothing can kill when we realize it is wrapped up in a living person who will never die.
If we are lacking hope, then what we really need is a direct promise from God. It can came through Scripture, a word given by someone else or the direct whisper of the Holy Spirit to our hearts.
If we are losing hope in a promise we used to believe, we can can find our hope restored by changing our focus from the specifics to the Savior. He is the one who can direct us where, when and how. Hope is restored through the discovery that I need Him more than I need any promise I am hoping for.
All our future promises are truly wrapped up in Him. He truly is the only hope for the world and for our lives.